Organizations use enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other business management systems to manage business processes and workflows. These systems may include various subcomponents to manage different tasks in a workflow. For example, an order management system may generate an order form, supply the form to a prospective purchaser, and process the completed form submitted by the purchaser. A delivery management system may instruct an entity to initiate delivery of the ordered items in the completed order form and track the status of the order items throughout the delivery process.
Each of these subcomponents may be wholly independent from each other, in that the subcomponents may not directly communicate with each other. Thus, in the above example, the order management system may not directly communicate with the delivery management system. Although these subcomponents may not directly communicate, a business workflow may still require tasks and functions to be completed in a specific order. For example, an order form may have to be completed and processed before goods may be delivered.
To preserve order and continuity in the workflow, each of the subcomponents may update a status field of a object in a database. Once a subcomponent has completed its assigned tasks on an object, the subcomponent may update the status field for the object in the database accordingly. A second subcomponent in the workflow may be configured to check the status field of objects in the database and begin processing objects with a status field indicating that the prior subcomponent in the workflow has been completed. This ensures that the second subcomponent is not processed out of sequence.
FIG. 1a is shows an existing process management workflow 100. In this workflow, a first program A 110 may be designed to perform a sequence of tasks, such as initiating a first task 101 in response to a stimulus, performing the first task 102 on an object, and then updating the status in a status field 141 of the object. The status field 141 of the object may be updated to indicate whether the first task was successfully completed 170.
Program A 110 may be independent of the second program, program B 180, which may be designed to perform a sequence of other tasks, such as checking the status field 141 of objects, and initiating and completing a second task 105 when the status field 141 indicates that program A 110 was successfully completed. This may ensure that program B 180 is not completed before program A 110 and that the processing order of tasks in the workflow is maintained even though the programs A 110 and B 180 do not directly communicate.
Many existing business process management systems include the functionality shown in FIG. 1a. However, some users of these existing systems may have additional workflow processes that they would like to perform that are not included in the generic system. For example, users in some countries may have additional locality-specific compliance checks that need to be performed between different tasks and programs in the system. Other users may have specific processes unique to their organization that they would like to perform.
Users wanting to include additional user-specific processes have had to modify the existing systems to include the additional functionality. However, these user-specific modifications have also caused complications when upgrading business management systems or when integrating other systems with the business management systems. Complications may occur because the upgrading and/or integration process may either overwrite the user-specific modifications or may result in an incompatibility between the functionality offered in the new systems with the modifications previously made to the existing system.
Thus, there is a need for processes and systems that enable user-specific process modifications of existing process management systems that are independent of system upgrades and integrations.